Mist People

Sob, heavy world

Sob as you spin,

Mantled in mist

Remote from the happy.

— W.H. Auden

The sun looks unfamiliar when it's rising. It's an egg in the sky, the yolk with its whites sliced away, pierced with a fork and bled, dipped in the horizon. A deep yellow-orange semicircle. Flat. Not bright. Not yet.

She stands waiting, blinking, in the freckled line between night and day. This line, the line that divides light from dark, also waits. It holds its breath, it moves, it draws the curtains up; slowly the sun climbs, its bottom plump. She waits for the first autumn gust of the morning.

The sky blushes in shades of pink, purple eddies embossed in the clouds, wisps and swirls of washed blue and gray at the fringes where the final remnants of the evening still linger. It's almost time.

The breeze croons from the east. It comes as a surprise, unexpected, without warning. It blows and brings a handful of dust, brown leaves shriveled tight, the smell of sunrise, and him. The visitor.

The wind has brought him to her. This idea is impossible to doubt: it's too impeccably timed, too close to be a coincidence. She doesn't doubt it in the least. He walks past with a courteous nod—is he in a hurry? Perhaps. She doesn't know, doesn't have to. She watches him walk away, watches the back of his coat, and that strip of pale flesh above the collar, below the dense mass of hair. The wind has brought him to her, whoever he is, him with his flawless posture and snowy hair, and she thanks the wind.

She meets him again that morning, later, in the traditional sense of the word. His name is Mikhail. It suits him for some reason, the way a collar suits a dog, or a pattern suits a wall. It's a soft name, textured like a damp cotton ball: toothless, a cross between a sigh and a swoon, no crisp edges, the plosive k not hard enough. Doesn't rustle, doesn't hiss, like the parting of curtains. It's triangular in shape, three beats: thud thud thud. Mi-kha-il. Or, softer, improperly, with the vowels running into each other: Mik-hale. She fits her mouth around it, around the syllables; she rolls it around on her tongue, as if to test the bite, the smoothness of it.

His hand, she notices, has a firm grip. Firm for one with palms so soft. The fingers that curl beneath hers and press at the back of her hand are slender, to the point of femininity, although subdued, and warm. The nails are filed to a gentle curve. Fastidious, probably, or simply neat.

On the bridge of his nose perches a pair of half-rimmed spectacles, rectangular. Black frame. The lenses are not too thick. It lends him the air of a conceited intellectual, although not intended; it slides down when he bows his head. Her shoes squeak on the floor. He smiles.

His hair is thick, coarse to look at, cropped short. White. Even indoors, where the lighting is not as bright, it's the same shade of white as fresh snow, as the inside of a turnip.

I'm a musician, he says. A violinist, really. I travel to places and play to anyone willing to listen.

She nods, thinks of something appropriate to say.

His other hand, his left, has a slight flaw: hardened caps of skin at the tips of the first four fingers, each streaked by a single line of fading gray, gray as the lead on a sharpened pencil. Violinist. He's not lying about that, at least.

Even when he talks, he has a look in his eye that hints at him being there and not there, that he's only half listening. It's the same glazed expression people have when recently woken from a whole night's sleep, that fleeting moment of blankness, of confusion, Who am I, What am I doing here; as if he says one thing and thinks of another; as if he's been cut into two, and his other half, the one not present, is locked in a chest at the bottom of a lake, and he's looking for it. Odd notion, she thinks, for an odd person. How quaint.

This vagueness, this preoccupied sophistication, washes him of color. He's colorless, like a mirror, like a sheet of glass; everything about him slants in shades of white and cream and neutral browns: his face, his hair, his eyes falling downwards at the corners, his calf-length cashmere coat that billows when he walks, the solitary burst of color in him being the orange pullover he wears underneath. A specter, in a way, a ghost, halfway down the road to transparency, a chunk of his substance shed with every turn.

That sounds wonderful, she says finally, sincerely. Imagine the places you see, the people you meet.

He smiles, the flesh at the corners of his mouth dips, elongated depressions. Dimples. He looks down; his glasses slip a fraction of an inch. Unfortunately, he says, they never seem to remember my name.

This confession, impersonal though it may be, makes her laugh. Not because of the context, or not only; it's the usage of the word unfortunately that she finds so amusing. It's too in character of him to choose such a formal word in a casual conversation, launching it into a sentence, injecting it, like medicine, and watching it settle among the lesser ones without a trace of haughtiness. Quite a character, this man. But then again, everyone is.

She tells him: That's people for you. But I won't forget your name if you promise to remember mine.

He smiles again, this time showing his teeth. Straight teeth, white. Of course, he says, Lillian.

He's transparent, physically. Clear as water, though the image of him never leaves her mind. It stays there, flashing, disappearing, flashing again, like a burned-out neon sign, buzzing, humming. She could be raking leaves on a damp afternoon, and without so much as a prelude the general outline of his coat would engrave itself at the back of her eyelids, progressively, a single line lengthening, curving into a visible form, as if drawn by the hand of an artist.

In his manner prowls the faint whiff of a greater being halved, of a spirit beyond the man split in the middle, of being enfolded within the downy wings of a cherub and flown off. It fascinates her. Where's your other half, she wants to ask him, the one you're looking for?

She thinks, sometimes, that he may not be entirely human. If there's anything inside his clothes, inside his coat, it must be mist, damp and cold, risen from the grass, pretending to be a person. If he has a body, it's not made of meat and bone—it must be made of paper, wads of bloodless paper, sheets of glossy paper crumpled and stacked.

Then again, she thinks, aren't we all made of mist, inside? Mist people. If you cut yourself into hundreds of little pieces and you somehow find yourself still alive, which body part will you be? The eye, perhaps, or the tongue, a sliver of nape meat, half a finger. A knuckle, a kneecap, the chest? Or, most likely, you turn to mist, a sparse veil of it, invisible to the world. Souls of mist. We are souls of mist, we float in the morning and fade by afternoon, we touch things and leave our tears on them, our blood, our odorless, colorless blood. Water. Bloodwater, waterblood, turn it into wine, please, so we may partake in it.

But she's being silly. She has shaken his hand before and it was flesh she touched.

It's strange, too, this ill-advised fixation of hers on a stranger, on a visitor: she has talked to him only twice, on the day they met and briefly during the Music Festival.

On both occasions he still has about him the air of pensiveness others may find eerily unnerving. One could be yelling right at his face and he would only hum under his breath, eyes open yet unseeing, as if through a shroud, ears not hearing. Visible from everywhere at once, and yet so frustratingly unreachable, so distant, so abstracted, a half-mirage borne of the contoured edges of reality—the horizon made flesh, she thinks, lolling flat in the distance, retreating every time she takes a step towards it. But Mikhail is human, no matter how withdrawn or preoccupied—this she becomes sure of one day, on a mid-October Saturday evening.

By pure chance she finds him standing motionless in the mountaintop, like a bronze statue, like a stone sentry, in the part of the peaks where the slope faces a steep cliff, a few yards away from the spring. He has seen her materialize from behind the trees, and is now watching her make her way towards him.

A lady shouldn't be out this late, he says.

His hands are shoved deep inside his pockets, and even in the scant starlight, silvery, like fish scales, she can make out the rounded bulges in them made by his fists. She shuffles forward and stands beside him, close enough, far enough, the space between them decent, acceptable, nothing distasteful, strangers talking below the stars. Down the ravine they stare, seeing everything and nothing, man and woman, in the dead of the night. How scandalous, when put that way.

When I see a lady, I'll be sure to tell her.

He laughs. The sound of it is of the forest singing—dry leaves rustling in their branches, the hooting of a distant, invisible owl, the scampering paws of a mouse, all fused by the arm, tied with a flowing string called timbre, passed under the coals of birth, and carefully poured, hammered, stretched, and pulled, then shaped into a voice. It's the kind of laughter that trickles down one's nape, thick as honey and about the same color. She doesn't know whether she likes it or not.

What are you doing up at this hour, then, not-lady?

I couldn't sleep, wanted to look at the stars.

In the mountain?

Mist closes in on the rocks below, over, under, around; wraithlike curls seeping into the grass, between the blades, clinging as crystalline droplets of water. Up in the sky, the stars twinkle—there is Betelgeuse, Orion's shoulder, and over there Pegasus the winged horse turned upside-down, hooves in the air, and way over there, beyond the winking triad of the Triangulum, lies the great hero Perseus.

It's different here, she says. You know how the sky looks like a big roof, and the stars look like tiny holes?—At this he nods; he's listening, at least—Well, the canopies look the same from below. Like a roof with lots of holes. So when I see the sky and the stars through the leaves, it's like seeing a roof through a roof. She shrugs. I don't know. It feels special, seen that way.

He's quiet for a time. Curious, he says.

I must seem so stupid right now.

He turns his head to face her; hard gray light glints along the rims of his glasses. The lenses reflect her face, white, pallid, eyes wide.

No, not at all. I often have the same… sensation.

Like seeing a roof through a roof?

Not exactly that, but something like it, yes. He takes a hand out of his pocket, pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. His expression is ruminative. Whenever I hear a sound in the forest, any sound at all, I get the same impression. You see, the forest to me is a gathering of sounds, of music, like a dictionary is to words.

Or an album is to pictures.

Exactly. While you see a roof through a roof, I hear a sound within a sound.

So it's the same… and not the same.

Yes, that about sums it up.

She aims her eyes at the stars, and is surprised the see the moon hanging low over the horizon, among a glowing cushion of gray clouds, a slender crescent on its back, the color of stale cheese.

I've never told anyone about this before, she says. I was afraid they'd laugh at me. But you didn't laugh.

Those who laugh at others are the ones who understand the least. Sometimes I feel sorry for them.

Have you, she says, hesitates, afraid of prying. In the end, curiosity wins. Have you ever been, you know, laughed at?

This question amuses him and draws out a laugh, a sharp stream of air exhaled through the nose, and a smile, thin, rueful. Soundless laughter that screams sheepishness.

Many times, more than you could count, he says. I've been called names, too. The most creative of which, I think, is cuckoolander.

What? Why would they call you that?

…They? he says. He pronounces this as if "They" is an old friend, someone he knows or used to know, someone forgotten, someone whose face he's trying to recall. He says: They is a name we use for people who are not ourselves. The rest of the world, that's who They is.

Now you've lost me.

Makes two of us.

They're quiet again. The night deepens. She's not quite sure whether the darkness is the last dregs of the previous day, hanging back to eavesdrop, or the stirrings of a new one. She likes to think of it as nighttime residue. To him, who knows, it may already be morning, it may already be midday of the next Saturday. She doesn't understand how his mind works. Not yet.

You know, she says, given all that's said and done, I think you're all right.

Thank you. I think you're all right, too.

Their subsequent meetings grow friendlier and less formal, often in the same clearing by the summit, rationed out at regular intervals, as if scheduled beforehand. They're not. When the sun is up they would talk of neutral things, of peonies, of blue jays, of the weather. On rarer occasions, when they happen to meet at night, they would whisper about unseen things, the abstract, strange questions, wild speculations, frequently coming from her. She likes those talks, she likes the bizarre. He would listen, each time, hands in pockets, back straight. His back is always straight.

Music, of course, interests him the most, but she soon learns that his smaller passions extend to other branches of art: he adores Van Gogh, Gaugin, and the lesser-known Matisse; he finds Nabokov's works dull and brittle yet for some reason impossible to put down; he has once spent six straight hours staring at the ceiling of St. Sistine Chapel.

There are also other things, smaller ones, that she manages to wheedle out of him from time to time, little doses of truths in his everyday life that cry of the routine and the humdrum, trivial as dust under a bureau. One thing she learns early on is that he uses unscented soap whenever he can. ("The scented ones make me sneeze.") Tofu he can devour by the bucket, yet pasta, of any kind, he titters at. His favorite color—and this surprises her more than it should—is red: the darker, the better. He has worn glasses since fourteen, he confesses sheepishly, and at school he was one of those wimpy kids, those scrawny bow-legged glue-eating scapegoats, the ones picked last in dodgeball.

He also possesses a limpid vulnerability to blurt out the oddest things on the oddest of times, especially during late autumn days of heavy downpour, when the sun skitters behind crimpled mantles of cumulus. ("Do you hear the frogs croaking? It's nature's own symphony." Or, later, "The wind is fierce today. As if it's in pain.")

As with all unusual things, this unsettles her at first. And, as with all unusual things, it beckons to her not as a flaw, but as an asset, glowing, out of reach: the honey in a beehive, the cheese in a mousetrap, the tongue of flame summoning a moth. It burns her, too, this fire, although not in the way moths are supposed to burn.

She finds a humming contentment in these things, in these little facts, and she enjoys watching them flesh out the person behind the ephemeral melody, sharpening his edges, making him real. She hoards them, keeps them together in a safe place, inside some secret cabinet only she knows, under a loose floorboard, or within the pleats of her skirts, in a pocket of her jeans. She takes them out, looks at them once in a while.

And yet, for all her efforts, the invisible wall that separates him from the rest of the world still remains, as well as the haunting vagueness that follows him wherever he goes. He's halfway through, now, part spirit, part flesh. Part mist. Nearly there.

He's private, secretive, but not shy, neither awkward nor unsociable; in the wake of his movements trails a certain elegance, like that of an antique chandelier, a gracefulness uncorrupted, untouched, by his attention's tendency to wander among the clouds, to flit from branch to creaking branch. He does that a lot, that sort of mind wandering, especially by the river. This Mikhail himself admits: I listen to both the words and the voice, but mostly to the voice, and the music behind it. That's why I seem to space out when someone talks to me. But I do listen.

What do you mean, music behind the voice? she asks.

I mean just that. Behind every voice is a music no one hears.

Gently he presses his thumb against her chin, hooks his forefinger under it, tips her head back, exposes her neck, white in the sun, she thinks, It's too pasty, too pale, how embarrassing. The fingers trail, ghost down to the hollow of her throat, and there they stop and burn the skin they touch.

Right here, he says.

His fingers are cool and her cheeks are not. She swallows; does he feel that? She hopes not. She asks, In my throat?

In everyone's throats, he says, pulling his hand away. You can find music anywhere if you listen hard enough.

Even in complete silence?

He smiles. Especially in complete silence.

He's a breath of fresh air. Of mist. He breaks the monotony of normalcy without realizing it, with that dazed look he wears like a mask, a slight curving of the mouth. Almost a smile, but not quite. A not-smile. Eyes blurry. He's myopic, but of a different kind; his nearsightedness, like him, is difficult to grasp: anything he doesn't hear, he doesn't see. Probably he keeps in his head a list of things he can and can't hear, two columns, endless rows, and in the left column, the first item is silence.

It doesn't bother her, this dreaminess. If he permits it, she would like to walk in the clouds with him, see for herself the world he calls his own. She's only afraid there's nothing in it after all.

It's a cool Wednesday afternoon when he tells her about his mentor for the first time. The light has the texture of weathered wood, of melted butter, slick and tawny, translucent in some places, as if liquefied partway and abandoned; it falls through his window in a sharp angle, paints a rectangle on the floor, luminous, wide at the top and narrow at the bottom. It gives his hair a yellow tint at the tips, and his glasses a shine that hides his eyes.

She's sitting on the bed, on one of the beds, and he's on the floor with his legs before him, behind the sofa, the one near the window. He's cradling his Stradivarius in both hands. His head is bent forward, she sees only his hair and his forehead and his nose, a Roman nose, Ayame would say, the curved bridge and the tip, and his glasses are reduced to a thin line; she glances around her.

This room—his room, she should say—is neat, except for the sheaves of paper scattered on tabletops and splayed on bureaus and slipped under vases. There's a sheet stuck to the mirror, wedged in the space between the frame and the glass, and another one peeking out of a drawer, second one from the bottom. Scribbled things, notes jotted down in haste, a melody in transit, forgotten in time. Such is the way of artists.

He doesn't like being called an artist. He prefers musician, or better yet, violinist. Says it's clearer that way. Artist: I make art. What sort of art? Musician: I make music. With what? Violinist: I play the violin, screw everything else.

There are flowers in the vase. Tulips, red ones. Green stalks.

Some violins live longer than humans, he says. But only if taken care of.

He runs the tip of his finger along the bow, brings it to his mouth, blows away the rosin dust clinging to it. How does he do that, how does he move like that, as if his joints are mechanical and oiled to perfection? Such elegance in a man—she's envious of it, a little.

The bottoms of her feet brush the floor. She swings them up and down, like a child. It gives her a nostalgic vertigo, this childish gesture, she doesn't know why. How old is your violin? she asks.

Ninety, I think. Though it may be older.

Wow. It's amazing how beautiful it still sounds.

He nods, smiles his thanks. It belonged to my teacher, he says.

You have a teacher?

He looks up. Now she can see his eyes, and they're looking at her. Had, he says, softly. He's dead now.

Oh. I'm sorry.

He waves this off as if it doesn't matter. Perhaps it really doesn't, not anymore.

He's the one who took me in when I lost my parents, he says after a pause. Everything I know about music, I learned from him.

He sounds brilliant, she tells him. She wants to say more, offer something more than a platitude, if only to keep him talking. She doesn't.

He nods. His eyes, with their usual unfocused expression, grow dimmer as he stares at her, then through her, peering across dimensions into the distant past, seeing, watching ghosts of the people he loved pretending to be alive. That man, he says, he taught me discipline and patience—do you know that I used to throw horrible fits when I was a child? He pauses, laughs. Half embarrassed. Especially right after my parents' deaths. I would demand to see my mother and father, and when they didn't come, I'd scream and hit my head against the wall. I'd tear up the curtains and refuse to eat for days. I must have been a handful.

She thinks, say something, you idiot. Say something. Anything. Show him you're listening. But she doesn't. He talks again.

He was the one who taught me how to play. He taught me about Paganini, about Vivaldi and Wienawski and Sarasate, all those names that used to mean nothing to me. And before he died, he gave me his violin. That's why I couldn't let go of this one. Ever.

A nod from her. That's all she manages—her throat, damned treacherous thing, has locked up. Her tongue is a knot, her voice a slab of cement, stiff, unmanageable. Why now, she thinks, why now, when he's telling me something from his past?

He stirs, shakes his head, as if to rid himself of sentiments. His eyes focus, he gives her a smile, a sad one. I'm sorry, he says. I must have bored you to death.

No, not at all. I'm glad you told me.

And she thinks, Too late, voice, too late. A little earlier, I could have said more.

She tries to hear what he does, tries to listen to nothing. Complete silence. Empty air muffled by dust. Does he listen to that, too, to the dust? He says there's music everywhere. Even, perhaps, under your nails, or between the iron bars in prisons. In secret drawers, tarnished lockets. But in silence there is no toehold for music—or is it the other way round? Let's climb that tree and listen to nothing. Let's watch The Sound of Music on mute. Listening to silence is like watching darkness, tasting blandness. Like going nowhere. As if nowhere is a place you could actually visit, as if nowhere is a foreign country, beyond the border, across the sea, an abandoned cottage in the sky. Fill your cup with emptiness and drink it, see how it tastes. She thinks it will taste like tears.

If darkness has a shape, it will be an ear, with whorls and canals and rounded edges and a fleshy lobe at the bottom. No earrings. An ear, because darkness listens. It catches words and keeps them in a sack and beats them with a stick. Secrets are safe in the darkness.

It's the time of the year when days hurtle hand in hand towards a single point in space just below the horizon, the kind of season when events slip past without sticking to anyone's memory. The world is a blur, the sky still blue, whirling, rotating, browns and golds and ochres spinning like a top, tilted. Days are getting colder, the grasses hoarier, and this particular morning even the light is cold, bruised, greenish when viewed from the corner of an eye.

Will you please play? she asks him. But only if you don't mind.

For you? Anytime.

With a thoughtful expression he bends down to snap open his violin case: clack, clack. It's black, lacquered, not as pristine as the instrument inside it. Anything in particular you have in mind? he says. He takes the violin in both hands, his mentor's precious ninety-year-old Stradivarius, with reverence in his finger-ends, in his arms.

Not really, she says. I don't know any violin pieces. What's your favorite?

He straightens up, gives her a smile that's slightly apologetic. He says, That's like asking me to pick a favorite child. He wedges the violin between his shoulder and chin, poises the bow upon the strings. Shoots her a glance and asks, How about Bach's Partita no. 2 in D minor, Allemande?

He's teasing, she sees it. He knows she doesn't recognize the name. Yes, please, she says, and grins.

And so he plays. Goddess help her, Goddess save the drowning—it's heavenly, it's joy in its primal, visceral form, a chilling fire that smells of ecstasy and the richest drop of passion, so lush that even the birds stop prattling to sing along. The music sounds to her as if it's being played by many instruments at once, arrayed in a straight line, ten violins, ten players, forty strings in all. Ten souls, one body: My name is Legion, for we are many.

For all its perfection, the music's arms fall slack and set her attention free. She finds herself fascinated instead by the sight of him playing: she follows his hand, softly oscillating, rocking and gliding and twirling the bow; she stares at his strong profile, etched against the backdrop of withered leaves, the sun lighting his hair, his glasses, the curve of his nose; his brow she watches for dampness, for a crinkling frustration, anything that says This is difficult, this is pointless, I shouldn't have listened to her. There isn't any.

He plays with his eyes open. She doesn't know why she expected him to close his eyes, she's never watched anyone play the violin before, although isn't that what musicians do, close their eyes when they play? Even so, when he's standing there playing with open eyes, swaying slightly now and then, he's… beautiful. Probably not the best choice of word, but who's there to judge her?

She realizes he has finished playing, and she's still staring at him with her mouth open. It's as though time itself has stopped trudging along and has doubled back to listen to him play, dawdles when he stops. He coughs into his fist, softly, the way he always does when he's flustered. She snaps out of it, claps, and says, stupidly, That was amazing. Beautiful. Never heard anything like it.

Thank you, he says, and sits down beside her. Although you'll listen better if you don't watch. Not that I mind you watching, of course.

December comes with a cloak bundled under its arm, and with a sweep of its hand brushes away the last of autumn's trail. Rivers freeze, birds migrate, trees stand with naked arms stretched high. Nights deepen into a black so deep it pulls the sky down closer to the ground, black as the clammy darkness of an empty well, like a gaping mouth without teeth.

Mikhail loves winter; it grabs his attention and fumbles with it and leaves it on the ground for someone else to find.

On snowy days he often leaves his sentences unfinished, tapered at the middle, the halves trailing unspoken questions in midair. Sometimes he shakes himself and picks up where he left off. Other times, he doesn't. She takes it as boredom, that he's tired of her. He insists it's something else altogether.

Sunday afternoon in January he takes her walking around the mountain's lower slopes. The air is chilly, the light clear, thin, watered-down ale spilling from breaks in the clouds, the winds stiff. The world has ground to a stop, it seems, nature is holding its breath and watching, watching with silent, unseeing eyes.

Plumes of white steam curl from his mouth. From hers, too. He's looking up, at the sky, or at the clouds, or at something he sees that she doesn't.

Forecast said snow, he says. It should be snowing. Funny how sometimes…

She waits. He leaves his sentence hanging, again, the open end dangling in her face. Her temper is unusually curt, today of all days, and she finds she's annoyed.

You don't have to hang out with me if you don't want to, she says. If you think I'm boring, all you have to do is say it.

He's surprised, she can tell, and confused. He gives her a look that's bewildered, if you're feeling generous, or stupid, if you feel like being mean. She feels like being mean. What on earth gave you that idea? he says.

Why else would you be saying something while thinking of something entirely different?

He's quiet for some time. He has on that expression again, that not-smile, although his eyes are focused. She's afraid she has upset him.

You want to know why? he says. His voice is low.

Yes.

He sighs. All right. He makes a swift movement, a sort of shuffling, a sweeping motion too fast to detect.

And then he's kissing her.

She must have closed her eyes at some point, she doesn't know exactly when, but she's sure they're closed, for instead of white she sees black. Black edged with pink, black as the wings of a raven.

She notices, too, that she's not breathing. And neither is he.

The most curious thing happens, a thing she has never felt before; a sensation of sorts that she has stepped sideways out of time, out of herself, out of the boundaries of this world, and that she's lost, stuck, floating and falling at the same time, wandering around a point in the past, zipping in circles.

All she feels are his mouth on hers, his fingers curled at the back of her neck, the frame of his glasses pressing down on her brow, his nose digging into her left cheek. It's cold, his nose, and rather sharp; feeling it on her face makes her smile, she thinks No, don't smile, don't ruin it. Yet she smiles, and, in turn, he smiles, too.

He pulls away—too soon, she thinks—and his cheeks and the tips of his ears are lightly flushed. A fleshy sort of pink. The color of lips, of gums, of eye-rims. It's from the cold, most likely, or from the kiss, or both. He's blushing, oh, how cute, how unexpected; Mikhail, cool as cucumber, is blushing. She feels something flutter in her stomach.

There's silence, afterwards. It's the variety you may call pregnant, or traitorous, or empty; there are only so many kinds of silence, after all, and it's never easy to tell them apart. This particular silence is dense and sluggish, it descends from above in puffs and gasps, like waterfall spray, like rain bunched in places. It's dry. Dry and alive.

So, she says. That's why.

Behind his glasses, his eyes seem to shrink into their sockets, away from inquisitive glances. Gray. His eyes are gray; neutral. He nods.

That's why.

Why didn't you just say it, then?

He doesn't answer. He's busy staring at her forehead, or around it, a corner of his mouth pulled down; he stares harder, frowns. He places his palm on top of her head, and with his thumb brushes the skin his glasses have pressed into.

I hope that doesn't leave a mark, he says.

He's taken to calling her love, when the mood for jollity strikes him. She calls him darling. He doesn't like it, her calling him darling, says it makes him feel as though he's her nephew, come for a visit. He makes a face, too, whenever she calls him that, sticks his lip out, not knowing he looks the part.

These names they utter part in jest, but they know, they are both aware that jesting always contains a splinter of the truth; it paves the way for more serious things, given enough time. They're practicing, rehearsing lines for the future, reciting from the script for when the actual performance comes. They know what's coming, and yet they don't stop it.

Is nothing considered something? she asks.

They're sitting under a tree, on a mat of flattened grass, as if on a picnic. Viewed at the right angle, at the right composition, with the right stroke of light, they may resemble a Romanticized oil painting, minus the parasols and draped lengths of muslin and devils in the background. But who knows. It's never a picnic.

It's March, the beginning of spring. He's taken his coat off; it's lying discarded in the grass, bunched in places. Presently he rolls his orange sleeves up to the elbows. They're pale, his arms, like eggshells, although not granular; they're neither gaunt nor brawny.

Maybe, he says. If there are things less than nothing, then yes, nothing is something.

Is nobody a somebody?

By the same twisted logic, I'd say so, he laughs. But why the questions?

I like your answers, she says. They tell me a lot about how you think.

And how do I think?

She swipes her palms on her skirt, checks if the hem is still tucked beneath her legs. Wouldn't do to sit like a man and show her underthings to the world, or to whoever happens to pass by.

Brilliantly, she says. Now tell me, do you think people are good or evil?

He takes his glasses off and buffs one of the lenses on the edge of his shirt. His eyes seem naked without them, susceptible, and in their nakedness more beautiful. She can see his eyelashes. Both, he says, switching to the other lens. In equal measure. It's just a matter of which side you choose to show, and which one you choose to hide. Some people even look for knives to cut off the other side completely.

Knives?

Not literally. Sometimes the knives take the form of religion. To others, money. Music, too, and family, and science. Loved ones. Usually, they're not sharp enough to cut.

Does that mean you think you're half-evil, darling? And me? And everyone in Konohana?

He laughs, puts his glasses back on. Turn your eyes inward, love, and tell me what you see. If there's no touch of darkness in there, you're not alive yet.

You're really leaving? she says.

The day is hot. Sweltering, searing. Thick air crunches inside her clothes, and the sunlight, dribbling yellow sunlight, creeps along the ground, as if it has fingers, yellow ones; it's sunlight fit to drink, if it's any denser. Hot. The heat is like the word smother, it covers your nose, sticks its hand down your throat and yanks your soul straight up. And it makes you sweat. Smother makes you sweat.

Only for the summer, he says. He's wearing his coat; his bag is on the grass by his feet. I'll be back by September.

I'll miss you.

I'm not going away forever, Lillian.

How long has it been since he last used her name? Too long. Nowadays she's love to him, love this and love that, Do you hear the river, love, and Love, your voice sounds tired. As if she's Venus reincarnated as a farmer. As if she's a cardboard cutout of a heart, with wings on each side. He should call her Valentine instead.

And he's darling to her. As in Darling, you listen to things too much, are you sure it's normal, no I didn't say that, don't take it that way, Oh darling, you say the sweetest things sometimes.

Now darling is leaving, and he's leaving love behind.

Here, he says. I'd like you to look after this while I'm gone.

He hands her his violin case, the black one, lacquered, the one she saw back when autumn was packing up. It's not just the case, though, it's the thing inside it he's talking about, the thing with its four strings and polished ninety-year-old wood and its smell of piney rosin.

She stares at him, and she knows she has an idiotic expression on because he looks like he's trying not to laugh. But, she says, but this is your teacher's violin.

I'm aware of that, he says, and a smirk breaks out. Smiles suit him better.

Are you sure about this? How will you play if you don't have a violin?

I have another one at home. It will do in a pinch.

You haven't thought this through, she says. This is your most prized possession.

He reaches out, touches her face, smiles with his down-turned eyes. His fingers are warm, soft as butter, pinkish at the bottoms. Not anymore, he says. He lets the words sink in, and they do: they sink in somewhere inside her where it hurts, they mend it, she feels them fluttering away in there.

And Lillian…

Y-yes?

I think you're all right.

She laughs; it's a choked laughter, happy but choked, cinched around the waist with a corset, around the neck with a coil of rope. Thanks, she says. I think you're all right, too.

See you.

I'll be waiting.

She watches him walk away, watches the back of his coat, and that strip of pale flesh above the collar, below the dense mass of hair. The wind blows. Bring him back to me, you hear? she says to the wind. Bring him back the way you brought him to me the first time.

He stops, looks back, gives her a parting smile, rounds a corner. Turn your eyes inward, darling, she thinks, and tell me what you see. If there's no touch of love in there, you're not alive yet.

a/n:

Thank you so much for reading, if you actually read this all the way through.

I would just like to say it outright that I know nothing about music, and I have never even seen an actual violin in real life, so please forgive the discrepancies you're bound to find here and there. Also, I'm very positive that there's no actual ninety-year-old Stradivari lying around, but hey. I almost gave Mikhail a Guarnerius, but I figured that would be stretching it quite a bit.

I may not have emphasized the 'Aliens' theme enough, but Mikhail is so weird, he practically qualifies as an alien by default. Honestly, I just want to slap him with a dead fish sometimes to shut him up and yell, "Enough about your heartstrings, guy. Just stand there and look pretty." Still love him to bits, though.